I’ve had my Dell Latitude for over 5 years… and it’s been 5 long years for the poor thing. It was my only machine through my entire undergraduate time and while I did get a desktop for my master’s, it still saw heavy use as I did most of my work away from home.

Five years of academic computer science study is no easy feat for a laptop to survive. Also did I mention that a suitcase feel on it once? That laptop just does not give up!

In all this time, I did only three replacements and virtually no other hardware repairs. I upgraded the memory about half-way through, I changed the battery some two years ago (the original battery was probably the crappiest thing on the laptop) and fairly recently I decided to give it a new keyboard because I had pretty much drilled through the old one. Other than that, it has valiantly made it through all this time, never let me down when I needed it and I am sure it still has a lot more to say before it will definitively retire (and when that finally happens, I will probably cry).

But in the world of computing, things move quickly and five years is more than an eternity, especially if you’re what I call a pro-user. Though my old Dell still works as fine as it always has, I need it to do tasks that it can no longer handle and upgrades won’t cut it anymore (it already can’t use all off the memory I put in it).

So, after I got sick of waiting for Android emulators to load up, I decided that the time has come to crack open the ol’ piggy jar and upgrade.

Now believe it or not… I crossed over to the dark side (or the white side rather). And I did so because they had cookies. Lots of them. So I got myself a nice and shiny 15″ Macbook Pro! And so far, I am loving it. I will probably post more thoughts about it as the experience progresses, but it is niiiiiice.

Of course this has raised some number of questions, especially from people that have known me for a while to be strongly opinionated about Apple computers being overpriced. To keep it short… the world changes quickly and opinions should try to keep up. I think Apple right now has a really really REALLY strong line of laptops. I think the Pros are still quite pricey (not the Airs though, those things are worth it) and I can’t see many reasons for a regular user to get them, but for pro users (developers, people that do any kind of media work etc.) I think these laptops are real sweet. To wrap it all up, what is a comparable computer on which I can run MacOS X, Windows & Linux (natively or in VMs) and on which I can do all types of development, including iPhone apps, and which offers the same hardware specs, quality and user experience for a lower price?

I still love my Google Phone, I still think Apple could be nicer to [mobile] developers and all the things that I’ve said before which are completely unrelated to this. I also want to state, for the record, that I have not been replaced by an Apple-programmed robot. I just decided that the MB Pro is the best tool for me to do my work on. Time will tell if I was right or not, but looking back at my experience with my previous laptop, I’ll say the stats are looking good.